EMAIL DETAILS

Again, it is amazing what Ted's press office is doing in your
absence! Clearly your presence there was holding them back.

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Alexander Snyder-Mackler <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Everyone grab next week's issue!
>
>
>
> --
> Alexander Snyder-Mackler
> (302) 598-8678
> ------------------------------
> *From: * "Dudley, Amy (Kaufman)" <[email protected]>
> *Date: *Thu, 8 Apr 2010 08:50:23 -0400
> *To: *'[email protected]'<[email protected]>
> *Subject: *Fw: TIME
>
>
> --------------------------
> Sent using BlackBerry
>
> ------------------------------
> *From*: Seemans, Misty (Kaufman)
> *To*: TK2010 (Kaufman); '[email protected]' <[email protected]>
> *Cc*: Connaughton, Jeff (Kaufman); Dudley, Amy (Kaufman); Goldman, Ted
> (Kaufman); Nolan, John (Kaufman)
> *Sent*: Thu Apr 08 08:37:55 2010
> *Subject*: TIME
>
> *TIME*
>
> *The Replacement Senator Causing Democrats Fits on Financial Reform*
>
> *By Michael Scherer*
>
>
>
> As the lamest of the Senate's lame ducks, Delaware Senator Ted Kaufman
> should be coasting at this point. No matter what happens in November, he
> will be out of a job a few days later, when his two-year turn as Vice
> President Joe Biden's appointed replacement comes to an end. "I'm junior,"
> the wild-haired, 71-year-old former Biden staffer admits. "I can't get more
> junior."
>
>
>
> But instead of sailing quietly into oblivion, Kaufman has decided to make
> waves. Most notably, he is challenging his Senate colleagues — and the Obama
> Administration — to get behind far tougher financial regulations than they
> have yet proposed, a move that has been unsettling to both bank lobbyists
> and White House aides. "I think most people know that I am really cranked up
> about this," Kaufman says with a smile.
>
>
>
> In late March, after most of his colleagues had split for the Easter
> holiday, Kaufman lingered on the Senate floor, waiting for his chance to
> address rows of empty chairs, a few pimple-faced pages and the C-SPAN
> cameras in his latest well-sourced broadside against the conventional wisdom
> on Wall Street and in the White House. "Unless Congress breaks up the
> megabanks that are 'too big to fail,' " he declared to an empty chamber,
> "the American taxpayer will remain the ultimate guarantor in an
> almost-certain-to-repeat-itself cycle of boom, bust and bailout."
>
>
>
> As a policy matter, Kaufman's prediction is heavily debated among
> economists. But as politics, his critique threatens to undermine the White
> House's finely tuned election-year story line. To hear President Obama or
> his aides tell it, the coming Senate debate on financial regulatory reform
> will offer a clear choice to voters this fall between most Democrats who are
> defending the interests of Main Street and most Republicans who are in the
> pocket of Wall Street. Kaufman, by contrast, argues that neither party has
> yet shown much seriousness about undoing decades of deregulation, and
> nonregulation, that created the conditions for the financial collapse in the
> first place.
>
>
>
> "Little in these reforms is really new," Kaufman says of the current White
> House–backed Democratic Banking Committee plan. He calls the provisions for
> new "resolution authority" to dissolve failing banks "an illusion," since
> the sheer size of the institutions makes painless, prepackaged liquidation
> unlikely. He worries about loopholes that exempt certain highly profitable
> derivatives from federal oversight. But most of all, he believes the current
> Senate plan, which relies on the wisdom of bank regulators, won't prevent
> another crisis. "The sad reality is that regulators had substantial powers,"
> he announced during another Senate-floor speech in March, "but chose to
> abdicate their responsibilities."
>
>
>
> The White House has mostly avoided direct public engagement with its
> unlikely critic. On ABC's This Week recently, White House economic aide
> Larry Summers dodged a question about Kaufman's complaints. "Senator Kaufman
> is exactly right," he said instead, sympathizing with the concern about
> large bank failures. In fact, on whether to dismantle the largest banks, it
> would be hard for the two men to disagree more.
>
>
>
> Kaufman, who has taught politics at Duke and holds an MBA from Wharton,
> traces the roots of the collapse to what he calls the "great regulatory
> meltdown" of the past two decades, a move that was largely endorsed by
> Summers when he served as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. But
> the Senator has been careful to avoid criticizing Democrats directly. He
> says he has not talked with the White House — or former boss Biden — about
> these issues and has only words of praise for Connecticut Senator Chris
> Dodd, a onetime champion of deregulation who wrote the Banking Committee
> bill. "We just have a very different view," he says.
>
>
>
> In his Senate office, Kaufman has stacked the latest books on the financial
> crisis on his desk, background reading for his regular trips to New York to
> meet with bankers and analysts. Financial regulation is a crusade he never
> expected to take on when he accepted his two-year posting. But his 32 years
> as a Senate aide taught him not to be discouraged by long odds.
>
>
>
> "One of the reasons I love this place is, I have been hanging out here
> since 1973, and you never know what's going to happen," he says. In other
> words, Kaufman is confident that the last big fight of his short Senate
> career has only just begun.
>
>
>


--
Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners
(202) 333-1880
[email protected]